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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Billing issues',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/02/11.jpg" alt="A street leading off into the distance on an overcast day" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="bill">
	<h2>Dental bill</h2>
	<p>
		Last time I saw the dentist, the receptionist told me there was a glitch concerning my insurance, so they couldn&apos;t bill my insurance company right away.
		They said it was a common issue with my insurance company, and not to worry about it.
		I&apos;d likely receive a bill in the mail because it&apos;d get sent out before they could get my insurance-billing set back up, but that I should ignore it.
		So the bill came, and I ignored it.
		I filed it away in case of later issue, but otherwise left it alone.
		Now today, I received a second copy of the bill.
		Frustrated, I took a walk (I&apos;m not supposed to be biking this week due to the surgery) to the dentists&apos; office, not sure if they&apos;d still be open at that time.
		As I drew near, I saw their parking lot was decently full, so they must be open.
		I explained the issue to the receptionist, and they said that while they couldn&apos;t directly bill insurance themself, they&apos;d write a note on the account to get one of their higher-ups to bill the insurance and get the issue cleared up.
		So hopefully it&apos;ll get done this time.
	</p>
	<p>
		It seems I&apos;ve lost my green earring now too.
		Only the silver one remains.
		At least I&apos;ve got some jewellery wire now, and a general idea of how to make more of these.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I agree, regular websites tend to be a nightmare for privacy these days, at least by default.
			Some configuration can fix most of it though, I think.
			If you combine $a[Tor] with the $a[EFF]&apos;s PrivacyBadger, I think you get pretty good results.
			I&apos;d also recommend setting the Web browser to forget all history and clear all cookies and storage data every time it closes.
			And of course, giving out private information such as accepting location requests from Websites or entering telephone numbers anywhere isn&apos;t going to help with the situation.
		</p>
		<p>
			I guess I&apos;m no security expert though, so there&apos;s probably a lot more that should be done.
			Maybe I should add that to my list of things to look into, but not for now.
			That other course I&apos;m in is still piling on the reading assignments, so there&apos;s no way I have time for extracurricular research for the time being.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I wasn&apos;t sure what to expect when I looked up Hadoop.
			It turns out it&apos;s one of the projects of the Apache Software Foundation (The Apache Software Foundation, n.d.).
			I have a bit of a bias towards them, so that knowing it&apos;s one of their projects already made me think it might be a useful project even before knowing what exactly it does.
			The Apache Foundation makes it sound like Hadoop is used for distributed computation (The Apache Software Foundation, n.d.), though Wikipedia elaborates on this and explains that it performs both distributed computing and distributed storage using the MapReduce algorithm we studied this week (Wikipedia, 2019).
		</p>
		<p>
			Hadoop runs across several machines, with one being designated as the name node, and the others being designated as the data nodes.
			Each block of data is duplicated to a few of the data nodes, so in case of server failure, the redundancy can keep the data accessible.
			The name node acts as an index for the data, keeping track of which data nodes have each block of data.
			The name node also keeps track of where the nodes are physically located, to facilitate data lookups.
			With that information, it&apos;s able to manage files within the blocks, creating, updating, and removing files as need be.
			Data nodes can be added whenever needed, and due to the redundancy, data nodes can also be removed without data loss.
			Both when adding and removing nodes, no interruption of service is needed.
			The data nodes also regularly asks the name node for work, so when those requests don&apos;t come, the name node knows that data node is down or otherwise inaccessible and can use other data nodes that have copies of the same data blocks.
			At that time, the name node can simply stop assigning work to the downed node and remove that node from the data mapping.
			When a new data node node is added, the reverse happens.
			The name node receives the request for jobs from the new node, and that node gets added to the data mapping.
			According to the site I read, the name node can be replicated to prevent the name node from being a single point of failure (Silvy, 2014), though I&apos;m not clear on how multiple name nodes cooperate with one another.
		</p>
		<p>
			As I mentioned before, Hadoop doesn&apos;t just store date, but also processes it as requested.
			MapReduce, the algorithm used for distributed data processing in Hadoop, works by breaking down the data and processing part of it on each of several machines.
			Once the desired result from each data segment is found, these result segments can be combined to form the final result.
			The MapReduce algorithm is given a splitting function and the data to be processed.
			This splitting function splits the data, and each piece is processed separately in parallel, with each piece processed on a separate data node.
			The results can then be combined to form the full solution (Silvy, 2014).
		</p>
		<p>
			After reading about what Hadoop is and how it works, it seems rather obvious how it is important in analytics.
			It allows you to break up the data of a difficult problem (or at least a problem that has a lot of data associated with it) and process the data concurrently on several machines.
			There could be too much data to feasibly process on one machine, or processing all that data may be feasible but take too long.
			In either case, Hadoop is able to leverage a cluster of machines to make the data much more manageable.
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h3>References:</h3>
			<p>
				The Apache Software Foundation. (n.d.). Apache Hadoop. Retrieved from <a href="https://hadoop.apache.org/"><code>https://hadoop.apache.org/</code></a>
			</p>
			<p>
				Silvy, N. (2014, February 2). What is Hadoop and how does it work? - Dataconomy. Retrieved from <a href="https://dataconomy.com/2014/02/hadoop-what-how-introduction/"><code>https://dataconomy.com/2014/02/hadoop-what-how-introduction/</code></a>
			</p>
			<p>
				Wikipedia. (2019, February 4). Apache Hadoop. Retrieved from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop"><code>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop</code></a>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			You make a good point about avoiding bias by not getting information directly from the developers.
			Personally, I was completely unfamiliar with Hadoop though, so I hoped to get just basic information about what the software even is on the Apache website.
			Their description seems a bit incomplete though.
		</p>
		<p>
			Like you said, Hadoop uses modular topology to spread itself effectively across several servers.
			That way, computations can be split across these different machines, as can storage.
			By keeping the same data in different nodes, redundancy is also achieved.
		</p>
		<p>
			I hadn&apos;t noticed that Hadoop runs on Java.
			That&apos;s very interesting.
			Java comes with cross-platform support, which is very valuable, though it also comes with some inefficiencies.
			I didn&apos;t see anything bad said about Hadoop though, so these inefficiencies must not have too much of an impact for Hadoop&apos;s use case.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religion</h2>
	<p>
		Okay, so my understanding of what I read today is that Yahweh and Jesus are the same being.
		I&apos;ll have to ask the missionaries about that when they come back, if I remember.
		A bit after that, we have a callback to that faulty argument I mentioned before, about how if there&apos;s no god then we must not exist.
		This time, the book didn&apos;t go through all the steps though, and just sort of said enough to remind anyone that&apos;d read up to that point of the argument from before.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
